David Fincher Reveals What Went Wrong with The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

More than ten years have passed since the premiere of the Hollywood adaptation of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, directed by David Fincher, one of the masterminds of psychological suspense and thriller cinema. However, the director cannot count the film as one of his great achievements.

Although the director is proud of what he did with the film based on Stieg Larsson’s novels, he acknowledges that the cost of bringing Lisbeth Salander’s story to the screen was too high and they took an enormous risk with it. This was revealed by the director himself in a recent Masterclass at Tribeca Film Festival (via EW):

“We did it the way that we could. And when people said it cost too much for what the return on investment was, I said, ‘Okay, swing and a miss.’ … I thought it would be interesting to see if you took this piece of material that has millions of people excited and you did it within an inch of its life — could it support the kind of money that it would take to do it? … We had pledged early on that we wanted to make a movie that was not embarrassing to its Swedish heritage. They said, ‘Well, can you shoot it in Atlanta?’ I was like, ‘Well, no. Atlanta for Sweden? I don’t know.’ We wanted it to be true to its essence. You shoot in Sweden, you’re shooting for eight or nine-hour days, if you’re lucky. And so the movie took 140 days to shoot. I was proud of it. I thought we did what we set out to do.”

In 2018, Sony tried to reboot the franchise with director Fede Alvarez at the helm and Claire Foy as Lisbeth Salander, but it resulted in an even bigger flop. The first film adaptation of Swedish origin was released in 2009, and it is the only one that managed to bring the full original story to the screen.

The original trilogy of books was written by Larsson, which were published after his death in 2004. Four other books continued the story, written by David Lagercrantz and Karin Smirnoff.

Related: 8 Movies That Were Almost Made by David Fincher

What The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo About?

Starring Daniel Craig and Rooney Mara, the film follows journalist Mikael Blomkvist, co-founder of Millennium magazine, who is accused of defamation after writing an article about a powerful politician, Hans-Erik Wennerström.

After the scandal, Blomkvist decides to go into seclusion for a while and takes a job from Henrik Vanger, a member of one of the wealthiest families in the country, owner of a major corporation. Although Blomkvist is writing Vanger’s memoirs at the eyes of the rest of the world, he was actually hired to work on the case of Harriet Vanger, Henrik’s niece who disappeared years ago.

Meanwhile, Vanger hires a security company to investigate Blomkvist. The work is done by Lisbeth Salander, a state ward with severe socialization problems and a traumatic childhood, but who is an extremely intelligent cybernetic genius.

Eventually, Lisbeth and Mikael end up working together to solve the mystery behind Harriet’s disappearance, only to discover a horror far greater than they imagined.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo also stars Christopher Plummer, Stellan Skarsgård, Robin Wright, and Joely Richardson.